turned out that the only south asian person most of these folks had ever seen were with sanjay gupta on cnn, and i got asked if i was related to him repeatedly. i still haven't met him, but one day when i do, i'm going to thank him for opening a lot of doors for me in west texas just several weeks after 9/11. i went down, and i had no experience. i mean, i had gone to law school, i had done clinics in law school, but i didn't really know what i was doing, and i just had to rely on some common sense. so i went to the courthouse. i spent a lot of time pulling files trying to understand, okay, which lawyer represented which person as part of the sting, what was the race of this person, what was the sentence of this person? did they go to trial, did they plea? i literally was making a matrix in my head about these cases and trying to understand what it was that i was going to try to do. um, i came back, i bought a suitcase at wal-mart because i had to stuff it with a whole bunch of papers and photocopies that i had made from the courthouse. i also, by the way, spent a lot of time with the famil